|| UNSAYING | CONTEMPLATION | TRADITION | MEDITATION | DISCUSSIONS | BACK MATTER ||
Volume One: The Way of Unsaying
Foreword
An Untrained Mind s Incapable Of Knowing Itself — So How Can It Truly Know Anything At All?
The Need For This
The Need For These Dialogs That Follow Is Not To Tell You How Things Are, But To Unsay The Things That You’ve Already Heard And Have Taken To Heart
A Word About Language and the Written Word
Language Is Intrinsically Deficient In Its Ability To Encompass Reality — In A Descriptive Sense — Beyond The Appearances We Experience
The Trouble With Agency
Agency Implies An Agent That Is Doing Something. If There Is No Agent, There Can Be No Agency
The Responsive Origin And Spontaneous Nature of Thoughts
We Don’t Tend To See Our Thoughts As Invited; Instead We See Them As Originated By Us, But That Is Impossible
The Illusion Of Qualities
There Is Something Definitely Wrong With Our Understanding Of What Our Conscious Experience Is
Understanding Experience
What Is A Meditative Experience? Well, First, What Is An Experience?
What is an Intuition?
I Think We All Agree That Intuition Is Something That Happens, Without Having To Agree To How It Happens
Knowledge
Some Types Of Knowledge Effectively Undermine The Possibility Of Achieving Enlightenment — Unfortunately, They Are Those Most Used Pedagogically
Recognizing the Dualistic Structure of Our Experiences
It Is Very Difficult To Overcome The Dualistic Structure Imposed On Our Experiences — Harder Still, That Of Our Language
Loosening the Chains of the Conceptual and the Intelligible
An Understanding Will Always Separate Us From The Truth, Because An Understanding Creates A Something-That-Is-Understood
Beyond Concepts, Begone Concepts
Somewhere Along The Way, The Understanding That Something Is “Beyond Concepts” Got Very Confused
The 7 Metacognitive Guides That Kept My Contemplations On Track
My Intent In This Article Is To Tell You A Little About My Life As It Pertains To This Work
This Visceral Feeling of Self
Wisdom Traditions Say That Our Belief In Our Independent Selfhood Is Ignorance, But Is That All It Is?
No Inherent Self
Even When We See That This Certainty Is Misguided, Its Visceral Presence Remains For Us To Worry At
A First Mover Is Not Needed
In Fact, It Is A Pretty Silly Idea That There Can Be Anything That Is Not In Motion
Mapping Concepts to Reality
Is Time Apart From Us, Or Is It A Part Of Us? What If We Have It Wrong?
On The Limen of Poetic Being
A Poem
The Irrefutable Fact of Now
This “Now” That We Talk Of Is The Edge Of Eternity, Which Is Always Present, And In Which All Things That Happen Thereby Become Present
Our Limited View of Time And Eternity
The Now Is A Vignette, Not A ‘Moment’ Of Time — Event Horizon Of Eternity, Which Isn’t A ‘What’
Eternity Poem
How Does One Describe The Indescribable? What Sweet Flowing Words Can I Use To Invoke The Proper Image In Your Mind’s Heart?
Inner Spontaneous Sound
What They Are Not, What They Are, How They Are Different, And Why It Matters
Consciousness And The Unconscious — Mereologically Speaking
Our Reliance Upon A ‘Subconscious’ Begs The Question Of How Thoughts Arise
Meditation And Science
Scientists Study Meditation, But Only Denatured Meditation. Is There A Rational Reason For That?
The Danger Inherent in Modern Secular Meditation
Secular Meditation Is Taken From Ancient Spiritual Traditions, But Jettisons Their Profound Wisdom
On Ego, Happiness, And The Suffering They Bring
Ego Fulfillment Does Not Lead To Being Happy, Happiness Does Not Exist, But There Is A Way Out Of Suffering — Comfort
In The Servitude of Science
Constructive Science Shifts The Scale Of Studied Action Beyond Our Ability To Experience Directly, Understand, Or To Use Wisely What We Know
Before The Pump Was Invented, What Did The Heart Do?
We Believe We Know The Truth Because Science Says The Heart Is A Pump. But That’s Ridiculous
The Peculiar Nature Of Light, the Universe, and Everything
Since Visible Light Is Just Part Of The Electromagnetic Spectrum, This Surely Holds For The Rest Of It Too
Paying Attention To The Spontaneous Arrival Of Thoughts
A Story About What The Dance Of Reason Tells Me
The Relentless Logic Of Mechanical-Materialism
It Pervades The Understanding Of The World That Scientists Work Within
On The Practice Of Science
Science Delivers An Ever-Evolving Understanding Of Reality — Not The Truth, Because That Is The Death Of Science
The Problem of False Halts and Captivity
Captivity Within This Process Of Naturing Is A Restraint That Cannot Be Broken
Alienation & Unconcoctability — The Change That Enlightenment Brings
Does Becoming An Enlightened Being Actually Make A Difference?
Four Intuitive Moments That Made All The Difference In My Life
How Are Such Things Possible? What Is The Source Of Such Feelings? And How Could They Motivate Me In Ways That Rational Judgment Could Not?
Entertaining Nonrational Experiences
Dismissing experiences out-of-hand because they are not comprehended within a particular understanding is not wise.
Personal Examples of Nonrational Experiences
Over Time, Unexplainable Experiences Of Being Guided And Protected Occurred, So Often That I Could Not Ignore Them.
The Intent For This Book
Science & Tech, Once Tools To Extend Our Reach, Are Impotent To Serve Us Now — The Scale Of Needs Has Inflated Beyond Our Power To Respond
Ruining the world
A Cautionary Tale About Trying To Save A Planet
Some Background On My Path
Placing My Awareness On These Inner Spontaneous Sounds Comforted Me Because I No Longer Felt The Absence Of Love, I Resonated With It
Speaking About A “Universal Path to Enlightenment”
The Techniques Might Be Different, The Stops May Be Too, But If You Are Seeking Enlightenment, There’s A Universal Path That You Must Follow
A Universal Direct Path to Enlightenment
Showing How Plotinus, Jigme Lingpa, Xu Yun, Avalokitasvara & The Buddha Described The Same Necessary Meditation Moves To Reach Enlightenment
Great Responsiveness — For The Good Of All
The Sound Basis of Mahākarunā — An answer to late capitalism and the climate crisis of global ecocide.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Volume Two: The Way of Contemplation
The Purpose Of This
A Paradigm Is Like A Very Complex Die Through Which Most Of Our Experiences Are Extruded, And Those That Aren’t Fall To The Wayside
Regarding Levels and Development of Consciousness, Confusion Therein, and the Foundation of All
Consciousness Must Be Fundamental, But For It To Be So, It Cannot Be Apart From That Which We Are Conscious Of
Why We Continue To Be Confused About Consciousness
My Earnest Suggestion Is That This State Of Affairs Is Wholly Caused By Our Limiting Modern Paradigm Of Deterministic Materialism
Our Reality is Responsive, Not Chaotically Determined
And Why It Matters To Us
The Mystery Staring Us In The Face: Our Ability To Perceive Fluid Motion From Video Images
The Key To Unlocking The Mystery That Is Staring Us In The Face And What It Can Tell Us About Reality
What is Experience, Where is Mind, What is Consciousness, and Time?
Explaining A New Paradigm For Science And Spirituality
What is a Spiritual Insight and How Does it Occur?
Discursive thinking does not exist in the more advanced meditative states, so one might ask how insights can arise.
What Is A Paradigm, And How Does It Enable And Limit Intelligence?
A New Theoretical Framework Can Only Be Formulated In Terms That Are Coherent With Your Current Paradigm’s Theoretical Knowledge Structure
Inherent vs. Intrinsic: Two Ways to Shape Our Thoughts About Reality
A Subtle Difference That Can Lead Us To The Truth
Awareness Is Unlike A Mirror
A mirror is not cognizant of what is appearing in it. The opposite of cognizant would be ignorant, or oblivious, or “unaffected by” so this allegory metaphor depicts the opposite of what it is meant to.
Breaking The Mirror
Explaining how a mirror is like awareness.
What Can Fluid Motion Of Videos In A Moving World Tell Us?
What Use Would A Faculty For Creating Motion Out Of Still Images Have If The World Is Already Fluidly In Motion?
Memory And Impermanence
Everything is in motion, even our ‘memories’ of events that we believe are true records of what was.
The Needed Distinction Between Reality and Existence
Making Room For Modern Science And Ancient Wisdom.
Why Awareness Will Never Be Found
And Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Be Aware.
The Three Defects of Every Novel Paradigm for Reality Proposed Today
The Only Way To Move To Another Paradigm Is To Completely Empty The Current Authoritative Paradigm Of Any Validity At All
Within The Heart Of All That Is Lies Unexplainable Creative Spontaneity
Scientists Are Finding Emptiness In Everything That Is Supposed To Be Solid And Philosophers Have Never Been Able To Define What “Matter” Is
Coherent Continuity
This Is Not Awareness As It Is Dualistically Defined, It Is Not The Ability To Be Aware, It Is The Ability To Manifest What Appears
The Axiom of Responsive Naturing
Humanity Needs A New Paradigm For Reality If It Is To Survive — Great Responsiveness Is That Paradigm
Reasonable Incausality
A Poem
Why Do We Have A Brain If We Also Have A Mind?
Great Responsiveness Is The Solution To The ‘Hard Problem’ Of Consciousness
It Was Inevitable That Science Would Declare We Have No Free Will
Great Responsiveness Explains How Recognition Of Our Acts Come Only After Our Desire To Do Something Has Already Commenced The Action Desired
How Do We Reason? (Part 1)
The Impossible Genesis of Thinking a Thought
The Creativity of Responsive Naturing vs. The Chaos of Determinism
How The Worldview of Modern Science is Holding Science Back
How Do We Reason? (Part 2)
Towards a Re-Cognition of Thought
On The Origin Of Complex Life
Random Mutation Undermines Ontogenetic Inertia Of Complex Lifeforms — Coherent Continuity Of Ontogenesis Is Evidence Of Responsive Naturing
A Revolutionary Paradigm Must Be Judged By Its Own Standards Of Evidence
A Priori Objective Veridical Facts Are Necessary Truth In The Same Way That Mathematics Are
The Experience of Fluid Motion in Films and Videos Suggests a New Theory of Consciousness
The Ability to Create Motion From Coherent Still Images Has No Survival Benefit Because There Are No Naturally Occurring Streams of Such Images - Or Are There?
A Concise Description of Responsive Naturing
All Natural Things Are Alive; All Natural Things Are Responsively Natured; Fate Is Where Each Starts Now
There Is A Way Of Seeing The World Different
A poem
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Volume Three: The Way of Tradition
The Pressing Need For This Forgotten Knowledge And Its Effect
One Purpose Of This Book Is To Share A Very Important, Relatively Unknown, Often Poorly Understood, Support For Advanced Meditation
The Name Avalokitasvara
A Noble Illustration Of The Process By Which Knowledge Is Lost Or Degenerates Over Time
Manjushri’s Recommendation
Inner Spontaneous Sound Is The Sole Meditation Support That Can Take One Directly To A State Of Enlightenment Without Tradition Or Teacher
Inner Spontaneous Sound Meditation Practices
Inner Spontaneous Sound Leads Directly To A Definitive Experience Of The Nature Of Mind, And This Is Its Unique Excellence
Mystery of The Four Elements Sound Practice
Inner Spontaneous Sound Is Not A Contingent Or Compounded Evanescent Phenomenon — This Is Why All Buddhas Reach Enlightenment By Using It
The Surangama Sutra
Containing The Most Secret Instructions For The Means By Which All Buddhas And Bodhisattvas Reach Full Enlightenment
Surangama Sutra table of contents
Introduction to the Surangama Sutra
Preface By Dwight Goddard To The Buddhist Bible
The Circumstances Of The Teaching
Chapter One:
1.1 False Mind versus True Mind
1.2 Questions of King Prasenajit
1.5 Questions That Arise in View of the Sole Reality of Essential Mind
1.6 Relations of Perceptions to the Four Great Elements
1.7 Questions by Purna Answered
Chapter Two:
2.1 Questions By Ananda As To How To Attain Enlightenment
2.2 The Defiling Presence Of All Conceptions
2.3 Spiritual Experiences Of Highest Bodhisattvas
2.4 The Method Of Avalokitasvara Bodhisattva
2.6 Importance of Keeping the Precepts
2.8 Final Words
Chapter Four:
Is The Surangama Sutra Authentic?
Exposure of wrong views, misuse of spiritual powers & deviant teaching inflamed the perennial attacks & false opinions continue to be parroted as truth by academicians and translators
Why The Surangama Sutra Is Important
My Discovery Of The Surangama Sutra Has Given Me An Added Impetus To Bring This Knowledge To The Awareness Of All People
A Century-Old Tibetan Prophecy Of Biospheric Collapse & Its Terrible Disruptions 2026–2032
And The Ancient Practice We All Need To Do In Order To Protect Ourselves Against It
The Rational Meaning Of This Prophetic Warning For 2026–2032
Explaining The Prophetic Text Compiled By Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö For 2026–2032 From Teachings Of The Victorious One Shakyamuni Buddha
It Seems The Subject Of This Book Was Prophesized By The Buddha
How This Book, A Prophecy For Today, And A Slandered Teaching Of The Buddha, Share A Common Goal
The Complete Instructions for the Practice of the Buddha’s Secret Path
The Disgraceful Reason Why One of the Most Cherished Sutras in Chinese Buddhism Was Not Taught in Tibetan Buddhism
Inner Spontaneous Sound in Parmenides via Kingsley
Kingsley Calls Out The Challenge We Face From Our Own Distractedness, So Craftily Weaponized By Those That Seek To Undermine Us
The Mystery
How hard-won knowledge can be lost over time.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Volume Four: The Way of Meditation
The Peregrination of Heroic Progress
A poem
Relaxing Into Presence
The Real, Irrefutable, And Not Theoretical Base Technique Of All Advanced Meditative Practices
Overview of The Inner Spontaneous Sound Practices — Part I
Great Responsiveness Meditation and the Yoga of the (Inner Spontaneous) Sounds of the Four Elements
The Quintessence of the Great Responsiveness Path
Mantra
How To Be Invincible
Achieving Heroic Progress Through an Ancient Meditation Practice
Great Responsiveness Meditation
The Meditation Path Of Avalokitasvara In Detail
What is Emptiness And How Does It Relate to Great Responsiveness?
The Unique Character Of The Inner Spontaneous Sounds Used Within The Great Responsive Meditation
The Quintessence of Responsive Naturing
Mantra and Explanation
Now Is Ever Pristine
A Poem
Do Not Try to Suppress Anything
When you attempt to suppress emotions, thoughts, or perceptions, you are chaining yourself to them.
Self-Delusion Trumps Intelligence
Metacognition is the faculty that allows us to clearly see when our thoughts, motivations, desires, ideas, and actions, are incoherent.
Are We Conscious When Asking What Consciousness Is?
A poem
Realization of ‘One Sense’
This Is Inner Spontaneous Sounds’ Importance As A Meditational Support, And The Origin Of Its Power To Heal And Transform
Simply Real And Beyond Illusion
A poem
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Discussions
A Fourth Dialogue between Hylas & Philonous and Introducing Noeinus
A Lighthearted Dialogue Extending Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism In Order To Overcome Its “Subjective” Framing
A Greater Self Is A Greater Error
We do not overcome the error of believing in a separate self by positing a greater self.
Action At A Spooky Distance
To accept “spooky action at a distance” is to live in an interpretive fantasy that is broken. Einstein was right when his mind revolted at the idea.
Authentic Wholeness Is Uncovered, Not Created
Separation is an illusion, but our shared story about how things are, is built upon that illusion. To deny it is to be an apostate.
Between Reality and Existence Lies The Limit Of Intelligibility
The liminal event horizon between Reality and Existence results from the limit of intelligibility.
Comfort Is The Absence Of Unfulfilled Desires
All Beings Seek Comfort, Not Happiness
Commonplace Malevolence
Has our malevolence towards one another grown to become so systemic, and pathologic, that it is now just a given in our lives?
Compassion, Sociopathy, And Normality
The Mere Absence Of Pain And Suffering Being Inflicted On Others Is Seen, Not As Normal, But As Compassionate — An Act That Is Beyond The Norm
Every Artist Knows The Truth
Every artist knows the truth that they are only the conduit for the art they make.
Evil Always Reproduces Itself In Its Victims
If we want to change this world, we must confront our own responsibility for the evil growing within it
Interpreting the Words of Enlightened Beings
We need to not have an understanding that stands in the way.
Is Enlightenment Possible?
If you are hoping for scientific evidence that enlightenment is possible you will be frustrated.
Meditating More Than An Hour
All The Really Interesting Things Happen After The First Hour.
Mindfulness Based Planetary Recovery
A mindful person is a better relative, a better friend and neighbor, and a better global citizen, so everyone benefits.
Plato On The Necessarily Nondual Nature Of Reality
Plato said reality is necessarily a nondual whole and that the appearances are proof that this is so.
The Practice Of Science Assumes Many Articles On Faith
Perfect science would begin with no assumptions; but that isn’t what we have.
Sciomorphogenesis
To Be Human In This Clear Way… Isn’t That A Prize?
There Are No Objective Empirical Facts
Mind-training frees us from mental errors that lead us to suffer, live inauthentically, and misconstrue what is real with what is not.
The Truth
How It Truly Is? No. How To Truly Be!
The Violence Of Words
The Horizon That We Must Understand Is Not On The Horizon But Right Here Marking The Territory Within Which Language Can Be Allowed
What Even Scientists Are Often Guilty Of
Why Scientific Knowledge Is Always Contingent, No Matter How Much Proof Is Gathered.
What Is Before Spring? Dōgen and Being-time
There is no moment of transition for events to happen in. There is only this present Now, and nothing else.
Why Is It Necessary To Not Eat Meat?
Countering The Claims That Gautama Buddha Said It Was Ok Under Certain Conditions.
Why It’s So Difficult To Communicate With Others
People are able to listen, they just are unwilling to do so.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
Back Matter
Seeing Clearly
A parable
Awesome Beauty Beheld
A meditation
Actually Being Nakedly Present To Each Other
The Way Of Spiritual Lovers
Blessing of Peace
My Final Words Closing This Book About Tranquillity’s Secret
Glossary
Definitions of important words used in this book.
Footnotes
The following notes are referenced in various places within Tranquillity’s Secret.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།